Welcome to another unboxing in first look. And I'm totally going to do this.
I'm going to put on the little
We're filming in 60 FPS, which will be of zero benefit to y'all on the uh the
YouTubes, but uh that'll make the motion clear for when I review the footage
later. This is the Aver Media Recentral Live Gamer HD. Capture and share your PC
game footage. Okay, full HD 1080p. There's a sticker on here. So, it seems
it was probably added sometime after the packaging design, but you can live stream with XSplit. This thing is very,
very compatible with XSplit streaming software, and it makes it very easy to
use. See, no plastic seal. This is not
my first time opening this product. I have actually used it already, and it's
pretty faking awesome. So, let's go ahead and have a look at the back of the
packaging here. And I want to show you guys what's going on. So, we got HDMI or
DVI connectors. You can just use you can adapt DVI to HDMI. So, it has an input
and an output. That's how you it gets a signal from your video card and then
passes it through to your monitor. It uses a PCI Express interface because due
to the enormous amount of bandwidth involved in capturing HDMI, it does need
PCIe. It has an H.264 hardware compression engine built into it. So,
the major advantage of this approach versus something like a Blackmagic
Intensity Pro, which is one of the other most commonly used HDMI capture cards,
is that while you lose some of the color
depth and some of the subsampling and whatnot, you gain the fact that your CPU
is not responsible for doing any of the compression. Remember guys, if you're
not compressing 1080p footage, you're going to be working with enormous files
that you'll have to have like a multiple hard drive array or an SSD to even copy
those files from the capture device to your hard drive. All right, moving right
along. You got a dedicated record button, so you can easily just press the
button when you're ready to record. And Rec Central, so that's their software.
Recentral allows you to configure it as much or as little as you want. So, you
can either use the totally I forget what they call them, but it's like capture
wizard or amateur. So, you can there's three different wizards that you can use
to set it up. And one of them is so simple. You basically press the button and it's ready to go. You can record
voice commentary with your gameplay. That's good. It does have a pass through for audio as well. Stream your live
gameplay over the internet using uh Twitch TV or XSplit to Twitch TV. Uh
profile selection and overview. Yeah, the profiles. Those are easy. So, there
you go. The maximum recording quality is 1080p at 30 FPS. You can also do 720p at
60 FPS if you prefer to have a more
fluid frame rate versus a higher overall resolution. Remember, most people
watching your video are not going to be watching it at full screen. So, if you
filmed at 720p in order to get better fluidity, especially for something like
FPS gaming, you might find that to be an advantage. The packaging is excellent.
See, they got like a cool little sort of shimmery black sort of thing going on on
the cover for this. And uh Oh, right. Another reason you might want to film at
720p 60 FPS is if you're capturing from a console. So, it's fully capable of
capturing from the PC you're gaming on, from another PC that you're not gaming
on. Although, there's not much point in doing that because a big part of the
advantage is the built-in uh the built-NVIDIA engine in here that makes
it so you don't have to waste CPU cycles. And you can also use it to
capture console footage on a PC that is nearby. So before we get too far into
the uh device itself, let's have a look at all the other stuff that's included.
So first things first, there's our
ready to record button. It's just a USB sort of software enabled hardware button
that you can keep up on your desk. We've also got their software which is
included, but you can also download on the Aver Media website. They've made so
many revisions to the software over the last little while that continue to
improve it. I'm very impressed with the way that they continue to support the
product. Sometimes you see these kinds of products where they're kind of purpose-built specialty pieces of
hardware and they'll kind of release it and they'll go, "Oh yeah, no, the software is fine. Just don't worry about
it." Um, but it's not fine and you do have to worry about it. In this case,
they are actually trying to make sure that they're keeping everything updated
and everything coup xsplit broadcaster
gift certificate. Oh, okay. Cool. So, apparently they're giving you a deal on
XSplit. XSplit is awesome, by the way. XSplit is what I use to do my live
streams. Um, okay. Content. Okay. We're
not going to read too much about that. Let's have a look at included accessories. So, just a three and a half
millimeter audio cable. Uh, oh, look at
that. They include uh a DVI to HDMI adapter. So, if you
wanted to capture HDMI in from a DVI
output on a video card, you just go like that. Well, you'd have to have a DVI
cable out to this, but you guys get the point. So you might go HDMI out to your
DVI monitor and sort of everything would be cool. And then this one is for the
other way around, right? So this one, so you can go out from DVI from your video
card and then use a small HDMI cable to go into here. And they actually include
the HDMI cable you need. So they include pretty much all the cables you need to
get going because you'll already have DVI out from your from your video card.
That's what they're assuming. So you just
Excuse me. Sorry. You swap this. You use this HDMI cable to go into the input and
then you go DVI out to your monitor and you're ready to go. So, we'll have a
close look at the card itself. It's got sort of a, you know, shield on it that
may or may not do anything, but looks really nice. It's got like a brushed
metal finish on it. There's your PCI Express OneX interface. Flipping over to
the back, um, just got some logos and
stuff. And this is the business end. So, there's your HDMI out that goes out to
the device you're going to be using to monitor what's actually going on. So your monitor or your TV there's HDMI in
that goes from the device that's outputting the signal you want to capture audio out and audio in to go
along with those although you are not forced to use the analog connectors you
can also capture audio over HDMI which I
have done with this card already.
So what's the point? Lots of people are streaming on XSplit. Okay, do yourselves
a favor. Go look up PewDiePie on YouTube.
Mind blown. It's the most bizarre thing in the world, but he's making hundreds
of thousands of dollars streaming games and sort of having a webcam going in the
background. So, I'm not saying that you buy one of these, you're going to make back your investment like that. But, if
you're good at it, then there's a huge advantage to having something like this
because instead of using up CPU cycles, which will cause your game performance
to degrade because unless you have a beast CPU, that's just what happens.
This does all the compression of the footage on its own. You can use it to
capture external sources such as consoles as well. So, it gives you more
flexibility and it works very seamlessly
compared to and the compatibility is better compared to the Blackmagic
Intensity Pro that I also own. So, thank you for checking out my unboxing and
first look at the A Media Live Gamer HD. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech
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